Make Your Own Comics

Exercises for the Classroom

1. Start with a character

Will your character be an avatar of yourself? A plucky young heroine? A grizzled space pirate? A robot with feelings? Design your character with simple shapes that can easily be repeated from panel to panel. Put them in different poses, draw them far away and up close, from various views. Once the character starts moving on their own, you have the start of a story.

2. Journey from panel to panel

Draw the action from left to right, top to bottom across the page. The space between panels is called the gutter. In the gutter, time passes. This amount of time can be a millisecond (a character blinks) or an eon (a star collapses). Use small changes in expression and pose to show what the character is thinking and feeling. Add thought balloons and text bubbles for dialogue.

3. Create new characters

Make each character distinct in shape and personality. Let their form dictate their behavior and action. How do they complement or oppose the main character? What new direction can they take the story?

4. How does it end?

If your comic is a single page, try to create resolution in the final panel. This may be a joke, a question, a narrow escape. Or it may be a portal that opens to the next page, leading the next part of the story. A panel is built on lines. A page is built on panels. A chapter is built on pages. A story is built on chapters. An endlessly unraveling tale with an extended fictional universe and backstory is built one story at a time.

Start small. Use simple shapes and expressive lines. Create a character that feels real to you. Take them on a journey.

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Teachers and aspiring cartoonists, feel free to download the images in this post and use them in your studies.

To host a zoom cartooning workshop, please contact my speaking agency, Authors Out Loud.

For more cartooning exercises, check out my post on how to make poetry comics: